Intern's Project Teaches Children Bethlehem's Past

Not all the history taught to school children these days comes out of textbooks - at least not in Bethlehem.

Visiting the site where the Moravian settlement had its start has been part of the curriculum for elementary and middle school students in the Bethlehem Area School District for a number of years.

Historic Bethlehem Inc. has developed programs relating to the 18th century lifestyles of Bethlehem's founders for the various grade groups - programs attended by more than 5,000 Lehigh Valley area students last year, and even more this year. A fifth program introduced in recent months will be given even greater attention next school year.

While serving the past year as an intern with HBI, Gale Treible of Blairstown, N.J., an anthropology-museum studies major at Muhlenberg College, researched, developed and saw the start of her "Discovering the Past" project for students in the seventh through ninth grades.

Treible, pleased with the outcome, said her interest began as a volunteer with HBI.

"I never realized that there was an industrial area here," she said. "You can't see it just passing through Bethlehem."

She designed her program to give older students an introduction to the resources available for investigating Bethlehem's past, to allow them to observe and utilize what they learn, to acquaint them with the methods and materials of historic research and to show the results of reconstruction and restoration.

She shows a series of slides illustrating how HBI came about and how the 18th century Industrial Area along the Monocacy Creek in downtown Bethlehem developed from a one-time junk yard, then goes on to some of the early structures for discovery and study.

Discovering begins with the 1749 Pottery wall north of the Main Street exit of the Hill-to-Hill bridge where clearing efforts were begun as part of the Monocacy Creek Urban Renewal Area in the early 1960s.

"My point here," Treible said, "is that people didn't realize that it really was something important until efforts to tear it (the Pottery) down were already started. I have the students observe the features of the wall, to realize that observation, research and sometimes archaeology are needed to find out the history of a building."

She said students have expressed particular interest in the Pottery wall. They note its construction, the ways the stones are cut, the type of foundation, the patching bricks and remaining doorway. The brick is crumbling and they want to know why.

The next stop is the 1762 Waterworks, where various features of the Moravian structure are explained. The eyebrow arches, for example, serve to evenly distribute the weight around the windows of the stone building with a clay tile roof. And the hip roof permits the rain to "come away from the doorway, windows and foundation."

Here, she points out, "students can see the stone work is unfaced (not perfectly cut to fit each other), which made it easier and less time-consuming to construct. In the corners, builders used huge slabs and as they moved in, they started with smaller size stones, taking into consideration the weight of the building. Technology was very high, even then."

A few steps away, the students take a closer look at the foundation of the 1766 linseed oil mill. The emphasis here, Treible said, is to show that we are able to go back into the records and observe what we have left.

She explains to the students that, "if we did excavations on the site, they would damage it. When you excavate, you must remember, nothing can be put back the way it was. The artifacts you take out can never be put back and you are exposing the foundation when you remove the earth."

Considerable interest has also been expressed in student visits to the restored 1761 Tannery, where the evolution of its uses from tannery to tenement building to laundry is outlined. Even the entrance has been changed. Instead of ascending steps to the front door, the steps lead down into the building "because the ground level was raised over the years with deposits of silt and mud when the Monocacy flooded."

Treible asks the students to check for original and new ceiling beams on the third floor, which of the interior walls were put up when it was a tenement building, which of the stairways is still the original. Reference is also made to the large exterior doors of the third floor where the hides were hung to dry.

They have an opportunity to do their own interpretation in the final visit to remains of the 1752 Dye House, originally part of the fulling mill complex next to the 1869 Luckenbach Mill. Suggestion sheets devised by Treible request they look for the number of windows and doors that were in the building, determine how many floors there may have been, its basic construction technology and modern-day features.